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A comment on Why discussions on cyber snooping have been so painful for us.

Re:Why discussions on cyber snooping have been so painful fo... by grey-area on Saturday June 29, 2013 @06:35AM (#5961983)
The other dangerous thing about this attitude of, oh, it's only foreigners, is that GCHQ and other US allies routinely sweep up communications from all over the world (in the case of GCHQ probably mostly from the US). So if you send information to Europe from the US, you're being spied upon, and the information relayed back to the NSA. The same goes for citizens of the UK subject to NSA spying who have data or contacts in the US. This distinction between us and them is used to tranquillise dissent in the US even as the NSA blithely ignores their own rules.

In our increasingly connect world, does it even make sense to define rights based on where a person lives, or what country they happened to be born in? We should expect the same basic rights (right to a free trial, right to a free press, protection from torture) to apply to all people even if citizenship of a nation confers certain privileges.

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Re:Why discussions on cyber snooping have been so painful fo... by mtgx on Saturday June 29, 2013 @06:52AM (#5962016)
What worries me is that their spying "partnerships" are so broad, that NSA receiving data on Americans from GCHQ, and GCHQ receiving data from NSA, works effectively as themselves doing the spying in their own country.

So then this argument that "we don't spy on our own people", implying that "we have no data on our own people" is potentially misleading to the extreme.

Of course, NSA already spies on Americans, but other countries (Canada, Australia, UK, and others) might not be so "brave", and they could be getting data about every one of their citizens from NSA, which makes it just as bad as themselves doing all the spying. So the "legal boundaries" of these spying agencies are effectively useless.

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